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Let’s play a game. I’ll show you an image. You type in the keyword to find the exact product featured in the image online. Ready?

Google her sunglasses…

What did you type? Brown sunglasses? Brown sunglasses with heavy frame? Retro-look brown sunglasses with heavy frame? It doesn’t matter how long-tail you go, it will be difficult to find that exact pair, if not impossible. And you’re not alone.

For 74% of consumers, traditional text-based keyword searches are inefficient at helping find the right products online.

But much of your current search behavior is based on the false premise that you can describe things in words. In many situations, we can’t.

And this shows in the data. Sometimes we forget that Google Images accounts for 22.6% of all searches — searches where traditional methods of searching were not the best fit.

But I know what you’re thinking. Image SEO drives few to no sessions, let alone conversions. Why should I invest my limited resources into visual marketing?

Because humans are visual creatures. And now, so too are mobile phones — with big screens, multiple cameras, and strong depth perception.

Developments in computer vision have led to a visual marketing renaissance. Just look to visual search leader Pinterest, who reported that 55% of their users shop on the platform. How well do those users convert? Heap Analytics data shows that on shopping cart sizes under $199, image-based Pinterest Ads have an 8.5% conversion rate. To put that in context, that’s behind Google’s 12.3% but in front of Facebook’s 7.2%.

Not only can visual search drive significant conversions online. Image recognition is also driving the digitalization and monetization in the real world.

The rise of visual search in Google

Traditionally, image search functioned like this: Google took a text-based query and tried to find the best visual match based on metadata, markups, and surrounding copy.

But for many years now, the image itself can also act as the search query. Google can search for images with images. This is called visual search.

Google has been quietly adding advanced image recognition capabilities to mobile Google Images over the last years, with a focus on the fashion industry as a test case for commercial opportunities (although the functionality can be applied to automotive, travel, food, and many other industries). Plotting the updates, you can see clear stepping stone technologies building on the theme of visual search.

Related images (April 2013): Click on a result to view visually similar images. The first foray into visual search.

Product details on images (December 2016): Click on an image result to display product price, availability, ratings, and other key information directly in the image search results.

Similar items (April 2017): Google can identify products, even within lifestyle images, and showcases similar items you can buy online.

Style ideas (April 2017): The flip side to similar items. When browsing fashion product images on mobile, Google shows you outfit montages and inspirational lifestyle photos to highlight how the product can be worn in real life.

Image badges (August 2017): Label on the image indicate what other details are available, encouraging more users to click; for example, badges such as “recipe” or a timestamp for pages featuring videos. But the most significant badge is “product,” shown if the item is available for purchase online.

Image captions (March 2018): Display the title tag and domain underneath the image.

Combining these together, you can see powerful functionality. Google is making a play to turn Google Images into shoppable product discovery — trying to take a bite out of social discovery platforms and give consumers yet another reason to browse on Google, rather than your e-commerce website.

What’s more, Google is subtly leveraging the power of keyword search to enlighten users about these new features. According to 1st May MozCast, 18% of text-based Google searches have image blocks, which drive users into Google Images.

This fundamental change in Google Image search comes with a big SEO opportunity for early adopters. Not only for transactional queries, but higher up the funnel with informational queries as well.

Let’s say you sell designer fashion. You could not only rank #1 with your blog post on a informational query on “kate middleton style,” including an image on your article result to enhance the clickability of your SERP listing. You can rank again on page 1 within the image pack, then have your products featured in Similar Items — all of which drives more high-quality users to your site.

And the good news? This is super simple to implement.

How to drive organic sessions with visual search

The new visual search capabilities are all algorithmically selected based on a combination of schema and image recognition. Google told TechCrunch:

“The images that appear in both the style ideas and similar items grids are also algorithmically ranked, and will prioritize those that focus on a particular product type or that appear as a complete look and are from authoritative sites.”

This means on top of continuing to establish Domain Authority site-wide, you need images that are original, high resolution, and clearly focus on a single theme. But most importantly, you need images with perfectly implemented structured markup to rank in Google Images.

To rank your images, follow these four simple steps:

1. Implement schema markup

To be eligible for similar items, you need product markup on the host page that meets the minimum metadata requirements of:

Name

Image

Price

Currency

Availability

But the more quality detail, the better, as it will make your results more clickable.

2. Check your implementation

Validate your implementation by running a few URLs through Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. But remember, just being valid is sometimes not enough. Be sure to look into the individual field result to ensure the data is correctly populating and user-friendly.

3. Get indexed

Be aware, it can take up to one week for your site’s images to be crawled. This will be helped along by submitting an image XML sitemap in Google Search Console.

4. Look to Google Images on mobile

Check your implementation by doing a site:yourdomain.cctld query on mobile in Google Images.

If you see no image results badges, you likely have an implementation issue. Go back to step 2. If you see badges, click a couple to ensure they show your ideal markup in the details.

Once you confirm all is well, then you can begin to search for your targeted keywords to see how and where you rank.

Like all schema markup, how items display in search results is at Google’s discretion and not guaranteed. However, quality markup will increase the chance of your images showing up.

It’s not always about Google

Visual search is not limited to Google. And no, I’m not talking about just Bing. Visual search is also creating opportunities to be found and drive conversion on social networks, such as Pinterest. Both brands allow you to select objects within images to narrow down your visual search query.

On top of this, we also have shoppable visual content on the rise, bridging the gap between browsing and buying. Although at present, this is more often driven by data feeds and tagging more so than computer vision. For example:

Bixby failed to take the market by storm, and so is unlikely to be your go-to digital personal assistant. Yet with the popularity of search by camera, it’s no surprise that Google has recently launched their own version of Lens in Google Assistant.

Search engines, social networks, and e-commerce giants are all investing in search by camera…

How to leverage computer vision for your brand

As a marketer, your job is to find the right use case for your brand, that perfect point where either visual search or search by camera can reduce friction in conversion flows.

Many case studies are centered around snap-to-shop. See an item you like in a friend’s home, at the office, or walking past you on the street? Computer vision takes you directly from picture to purchase.

But the applications of image recognition are only limited by your vision. Think bigger.

If you run a marketplace website, you can use computer vision to classify products: Say a user wants to list a pair of shoes for sale. They simply snap a photo of the item. With that photo, you can automatically populate the fields for brand, color, category, subcategory, materials, etc., reducing the number of form fields to what is unique about this item, such as the price.

A travel company can offer snap-for-info on historical attractions, a museum on artworks, a healthy living app on calories in your lunch.

What about local SEO? Not only could computer vision show the rating or menu of your restaurant before the user walks inside, but you could put up a bus stop ad calling for hungry travelers to take a photo. The image triggers Google Maps, showing public transport directions to your restaurant. You can take the customer journey, quite literally. Tell them where to get off the bus.

And to build such functionality is relatively easy, because you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There are many open-source image recognition APIs to help you leverage pre-trained image classifiers, or from which you can train your own:

Google Cloud Vision

Amazon Rekognition

IBM Watson

Salesforce Einstein

Slyce

Clarifai

Let’s make this actionable. You now know computer vision can greatly improve your user experience, conversion rate and sessions. To leverage this, you need to:

Make your brand visual interactive through image recognition features

Understand how consumers visually search for your products

Optimize your content so it’s geared towards visual technology

Visual search is permeating online and camera search is becoming commonplace offline. Now is the time to outshine your competitors. Now is the time to understand the foundations of visual marketing. Both of these technologies are stepping stones that will lead the way to an augmented reality future.

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An article that came out at the beginning of 2015 was intended to (quietly) let people know about what Google had been doing to offer a new form of search results called Table Search. The article was titled Applying WebTables in Practice (pdf).

It tells us about an initiative that Google’s structured data team embarked upon, when they started the WebTables project in the second half of the 2000s, which involved them releasing the following paper:

What is Table Search?

There are many pages on the Web that are filled with data in the form of tables. It’s possible that if you weren’t paying attention you may have missedGoogle Table Search entirely—it hasn’t gotten a lot of press as far as I can tell. If you include tabular data on the pages of your site, though, you may be able to find tables from your site included in the results from a query in Google Table Search.

Imagine that I am looking to buy a new camera lens, except I’m not sure which one to purchase. I’ve heard good things about Nikon lenses, so I go to Table Search and look for [single lens dslr nikon]. The first table returned gives me some choices to compare different lenses:

For example, this result involving a search for [superman] includes facts from a Wikipedia table about the character:

Those extra facts come from the table associated with a query on Superman that shows tabular data about the character:

We can see Google working in structured snippets elsewhere, e.g., in presenting snippets from Twitter, like from the following profile:

A search for Rand shows the following (h/t toBarbara Starr for this example of a structured snippet):

Note how Google is taking structured data (highlighted in yellow) from the Twitter profile and including it in the Google search result from the Twitter profile “about Rand”. That data may also be from Twitter’s API of data that they feed to Google. I have noticed that when there are multiple Twitter accounts for the same name, this kind of table data doesn’t appear in the Google snippet.

Getting your structured snippets

TheApplying Webtables in Practice paper has some suggestions on how to create tables that might be sources of structured data that Google might use:

Limit the amount of boilerplate content that appears in a table

Use table headings <th> to add labels to the columns they head—this tells Google that they are filled with important data

Use meaningful attribute names in table headings that make it more likely the tables might appear and rank for a relevant query

Use meaningful titles, captions and semantically related text surrounding the table. These can help the search engine better understand what the table is about.

The ranking of tables in Table Search can be influenced by Web ranking features such as The PageRank of a page a table is on and links pointed to that page.

If you decide to use tables on your pages, following these hints from the “Applying WebTables in Practice” paper may help lead to structured snippets showing up in your search results. The inclusion of that data may convince searchers to click through to your pages. A data-rich search result that addresses their informational and situational needs may be persuasive enough to get them to visit you. And the snippet is attached to a link to your page, so your page gets credit for the data.

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I’d argue that our most beneficial adaptation was our propensity to be social. While many other animals are also social to some degree, humans combined the advantages of the pack for defense and hunting with a brain capacity that allowed advanced levels of communication.

That social instinct combined with speech gave us an extraordinary survival ability that led to us becoming the dominant species on the planet.

This article isn’t a science lesson, but I’m proposing thatunderstanding the social and interpersonal aspect of our humanity is crucial to effective marketing.

Now that may seem like a “duh” to many of you. You get that in this social web era brands need to be more “human” and be more “engaging,” that they need to foster real “conversations.” However, in this article I’m going to contend that no brand is really fully tapping into the potential of any of those social marketing aspects until they are doing so with real people: actual company representatives who become the “face” for that company in its content and social media interactions.

I intend this as a follow-up and further development of my last two articles for Moz:

Both of those articles were about Google Authorship, a Google Search feature that no longer exists. Yet it is my strong belief that the principal value of Authorship is alive and well. That is, there is tremendous value in having a recognized personal brand with trusted, authoritative content, connected to your company brand.

This article will explore that principle value in four parts:

The power of a social brand

The power of brand EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

The power of the personal for social EAT

Putting the power to work

Parts one and two are introductory. They lay the groundwork for what I see corporate personal brands doing most effectively. If you think you have a good understanding of why brands need to be social, and how expertise-authority-trustworthiness contribute to real business goals, then feel free to skip straight to part three.

Parts three and four demonstrate how the power of a social brand that understands the value of expertise, authority, and trust can be supercharged by tying itself to powerful personal brands.

1. The power of a social brand

Before I build this out any further, I want to distinguish between what I’m calling a “social brand” and the popular term “social business.” A social business is defined either as a business that invests heavily in social causes, or as a business that encourages its employees to be active online on behalf of the business. The latter type of social business is probably more effective in being a social brand, but it is not necessary to be a social business to be a social brand.

So what do I mean by a social brand? Simply this: a social brand is a brand that actively pursues use of online social platforms for the purposes of marketing and branding by taking advantage of the full spectrum of social interactions. In other words, a social brand does not just post to social networks. It actively engages there, seeking to enter into and create relevant conversations with real people.

Coca-Cola and Denny’s Restaurants are examples of social brands by that definition. Coke’s Hub Network command center follows a listen > analyze > engage process to catch relevant online conversations, quickly assess whether Coke has something to contributed, and when it does, create social engagements that enhance the conversation and win the brand new fans and friends.

Denny’s has a much smaller social team, yet they have proven themselves just as agile and creative as Coca-Cola in developing conversations around their brand. They built on the idea that the kinds of conversations people have online are similar to the chats people have with friends around a diner table to develop their “America’s Diner” brand.

In both cases, these brands were able to use social conversations to enhance and reinforce the kinds of associations they wanted people to have with their brands.

On social networks brands have the opportunity to share content and engage in conversations that build the expertise, authority, and trust that make real people more likely to buy from them when that moment of decision comes. In the next section, we’ll explore the value all that brings to a brand.

2. The power of brand EAT

What is brand EAT? The EAT acronym comes from the most recent version of the perennially-leaked Google Quality Rating Guidelines, the handbook for training the humans who help evaluate how well Google’s algorithm does at assessing the quality of web sites. Google now wants those evaluators to focus on three main quality criteria: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (hence EAT).

Even though those are criteria for determining quality as a search ranking factor, we should realize that Google emphasizes them because they are the “in real life” factors that affect how real people evaluate not only web pages, but entire brands. Let’s briefly explore each factor.

Expertise

People want to do business with brands that seem to know what they are talking about. Even though it’s generally cheaper and more convenient for my wife and me to deal through big box home improvement chains, we go to our local independent hardware store whenever possible. Why? We got tired of sales people at the big box stores who knew less than we did about paint or roofing materials or lighting fixtures. Our local storefront hardware supplier has won our loyalty and business because he’s always able to answer our questions.

It can work the same way online. I’m severely graphically challenged. When it comes to creating effective visuals for my content, I’m a great nuclear physicist (and I had to look up how to spell nuclear!). But via some social media shares I ran across the very helpful design tutorials at Canva.com. Those guides were so helpful, they caused me to want to look into Canva’s user-friendly image creation tool. And now I’m a loyal customer.

Authority

Authority is expertise taken to the next level. You can be an expert in your topic and just be crying out in the desert, but when people start listening to you, recommending you, and resharing what you say, you’ve graduated to the authority level.

At the risk of being slightly sycophantic to my publisher, I’ll point to the Moz brand as being a recognized authority. Through the high level of content associated with Moz, whether on this blog, in Whiteboard Friday videos, or at conferences, a great many people have high confidence in pointing to Moz and having their own names associated with Moz in the areas of SEO and digital marketing in general.

When I’ve published here in the past, I noticed that within seconds of my post going live, people were already sharing it on social media. Given the length of my posts, they can’t possibly have read them in that time! But that’s where the Moz authority kicks in. People have learned to have confidence that if Moz publishes it, it must be good. And so they hit that share button even before they read. Of course, that makes me always want to bring my A game when I write here!

The value for Moz is that the authority generated by their high quality content gets associated with the tools and services they sell.

Trustworthiness

It’s difficult to tease out trustworthiness from the other two factors, as it seems to me to be a natural by-product of expertise and authority. In other words, people are willing to place their trust in a brand that has helped them, enriched their life in some way, or to which others they trust point as being worthwhile.

Just as in human relationships, brand trust is never instantaneous. It has to be earned over time. And so I might propose that trustworthiness is the time dimension of the expertise and authority factors. Another way of saying that: trustworthiness is reliable expertise leading to true authority expressed consistently over time.

If you’re a regular consumer of content online, inevitably you’ve reached a point when you had to make decisions about whom you’re going to give your limited attention. Brands that have achieved trustworthiness with you are far more likely to be on that short list. And they are therefore much more likely to be top-of-mind when you are in the marketplace.

The missing dimension

As important as expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are for establishing quality, standing alone I believe they lack something that could bring them to life and make a brand truly stand out from the crowd. In the next section I’ll unveil that missing dimension.

3. The power of the personal for social EAT

The fourth dimension

Back in elementary school you probably learned that we live in a three-dimensional world. The dimensions of length, width, and height create space, the place in which we live and move and have our being. When you advanced further in your education, you probably heard, though, that a universe does not exist by space alone. Space must be accompanied by a vital fourth dimension: time. Time allows for motion within space, and everything we know and love comes from that.

I believe the three “EAT” dimensions described above (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) also need a fourth dimension to bring them to life and set them in motion.

That fourth dimension is the personal.

What makes us humans

Remember my little evolution lesson at the top of this article? I highlighted two characteristics of humans that contributed powerfully to our ability to survive and thrive:

Our innate desire to be together, especially with our families and tribes.

Our ability to communicate.

Together, those two factors not only contributed to human survival and development, but eventually enabled what we call civilization.

While most marketers don’t have goals quite as lofty as civilization building, we do want to do more than survive. We want to build our own brand empires, so to speak. In that endeavor, the social and communicative aspects of humanity are our allies, just as they were to the very creation of humanity.

Face up to it

Take a look at the image below. What do you see?

Of course, it’s a common US electrical outlet. But I’m betting you couldn’t help seeing a human face. The mere suggestion of two eyes and a mouth in the right configuration, surrounded by a circle, and our brain fills in the rest. What’s more, doesn’t this “face” suggest to you some emotion? Perhaps fright, or dismay? Pretty powerful for a piece of plastic from a hardware store!

Scientists call this phenomenon pareidolia. It’s the persistent human tendency to see human faces even in inanimate objects. The fact is that as humans we are powerfully drawn to other humans. So powerfully that we often project human attributes on to non-human things. That’s why we can even speak of “humanizing” brands, brand “personalities,” and brands being “social.”

But even though it is possible for faceless brands to achieve a certain level of humanization and socialization, there is no substitute for the real thing. That is, the power of human connection is most powerful when it occurs between two or more real human beings.

Even Google understood it

Even though Google recently abandoned its Google Authorship program that displayed a face photo (sometimes) and a byline name in search results for content by qualified authors, the fact that the experiment lasted three full years demonstrates that Google understands the power of a personal connection.

I find it interesting that Google has retained Authorship-style snippets in personalized (logged-in to a Google+ account) searches for Google+ posts by people you have circled.

That means that even if Google decided Authorship snippets were too much for regular search, seeing a name and a face are still powerful and useful signalsif that name and face are familiar to the searcher.

So it stands to reason that when a real face and name become associated with authoritative, trustworthy content, people will more naturally make a personal connection with that content. And they will look for that same face in the crowd when they need to know more.

Let our powers combine!

Let’s put this all together now.

We’ve already seen the power of EAT, that a combination of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness adds up to real value, something Google thinks worth recommending as a valuable exchange for your time after you click.

We’ve also seen that humans connect most easily and naturally with other humans, and those associations can be long-lasting and sought after when accompanied by the EAT attributes.

So here’s the simple idea, the thesis of this entire article:Your brand will most rapidly and successfully gain the social trust of its audience when it is closely associated with powerful personal brands.

The long journey home

When your brand begins to market, a journey has begun. You hope to get prospects to join you in your journey. Your authoritative, relevant content is the table you set to entice those prospects to board your train. But you still need to extend an invitation, and invitations are most powerful when they come from someone we know and trust.

It’s the difference between getting a flyer in my mail box inviting me to try out a new restaurant, and a friend calling me up to ask me to come along with him to check it out. I’m much more likely to go in the latter case. Now imagine how much more powerful that invitation would be if my friend were a respected restaurant critic, who had already visited the eatery and was now telling me I shouldn’t miss it!

Why wouldn’t you be using the method that is more likely to get more people on board your brand train faster, and with more confidence about their decision.

A challenge to all brands

Before I get into my recommendations for how to put the power of personal brands to work for your brand, I want to issue a challenge.

I know what I’m asking here seems like a huge hurdle for many brand marketers. Once upon a time all you had to do was put ads in the right places and hope the right people would see them and be moved by them. Then along came the Internet and search engines, and suddenly you had to be producing authoritative content to attract traffic and give that traffic the confidence to buy from you.

You’d no sooner put in the hard work and investment to build all that content then along came the social web. Now you’ve got to make personal connections with your prospects and engage them in ways that they will pay attention to your content, come to trust your brand, and eventually become customers.

In some ways the journey has become longer, but it can also be much more richly rewarding. Helpful, engaging content channeled through social connections can bring exactly the right people to your cash register at exactly the right time.

And now I come along wanting to add more engines to your already hard-working customer journey train. But I wouldn’t ask you to do that unless I myself had seen how much faster those new engines can drive the train.

Here’s my challenge: In the coming year,hire and/or cultivate from within at least one powerful personal brand intimately associated with your brand who represents you via his or her content and social presence. Make this one of your highest marketing priorities.

I believe with all my heart and mind that as the great battle for attention heats up in the years to come, those brands that had the courage and foresight to put their best personal brand representatives on the front lines will emerge the winners.

Objections, Your Honor!

Whenever I push this challenge, whether while speaking at a conference or conferring with a client, I tend to get the same objections to the proposal that brands put real people front and center in their marketing:

Wouldn’t it be better for our content to be branded with our company name/logo?

When social media started to become an emerging marketing channel in 2006, Erica Campbell Byrum couldn’t even access it because of IT department blocks at her company. She tirelessly campaigned for the value of social media, and eventually won over senior management.

She went on to create and champion online brand ambassadors for each of their 65 offices around the country. Erica always set the example and model, steadily building her own online audience. Based on overwhelmingly positive data showing how here efforts brought ForRent and Homes.com real business, the company expanded her responsibilities to oversee a 20-person social media team.

Erica is now the unmistakable face of the ForRent and Homes.com brands. Her engaging social presence led to invitations to speak at huge industry events, and eventually to New York Times Best Selling author Jay Baer selecting her to co-author his latest book, Youtility for Real Estate, vastly increasing her “youtility” to the brands she represents.

As an anchor for KOMU-TV news, Sarah Hill made TV journalism history when she became the first television newsperson to incorporate Google+ Hangouts and Google Glass into her online newscasts. She became an early Google+ celebrity, where she now has 2.7 million followers. She went on to become the live video spokesperson for Veterans United Network, a mortgage lending service for US military veterans. She used her journalism skills combined with her vast social following and reputation to create a strong association between VUN and various veterans causes. As a result, VUN has become a first choice for veterans looking to buy homes.

Space doesn’t allow for dozens more stories I could include, but here’s a list from Rand Fishkin of people he knows whose powerful personal brands helped build their company’s brands: Heather Brunner at WPEngine, Hilary Mason formerly of Bitly, Oli Gardner with Unbounce, Caterina Fake at Flickr now Findery, Dan Shapiro at Robot Turtles, Sean Ellis of Qualaroo, Marie Steinthaler of HopsterTV. (Rand told me he had to stop the list there or he could go on all day!)

How to make best use of personal brands for your brand

Now on to how to make this work for you and your company. My recommendations are based both on my own experience as well as my careful observations of top-performing personal brands like those listed above.

The Right Stuff

When I look at people who have built influential personal brands and try to assess their common qualities, the old nature vs. nurture conundrum always surfaces. Does someone have to have an innate gift and the right personality qualities to be effective in this role? I won’t try to solve that here, but whether natural or developed, people who do well representing their brands in public tend to exhibit the following characteristics:

Likability. I put this first because even though it is the hardest characteristic to quantify, given how much the effectiveness of a personal brand is dependent on the ability to make personal connections, the tendency to be well-liked is key. That doesn’t at all mean someone who sacrifices personal integrity or refuses to take a stand in order to “win friends and influence people.” A truly likable person can maintain relational ties even through disagreements.

Smarts. By this I mean the person has to have a deep understanding of your business and your marketplace. They really should be an expert in at least some aspect of your business. You’re looking for the kind of person who in a press conference or Q&A session could authoritatively answer most any question thrown at him or her.

Gift of gab. Here I don’t mean “chatty,” but rather someone who truly enjoys getting into conversations about his or her passions and interests. They should feel comfortable in front of a camera or life audience. She or he should also have the ability to create coherent, compelling content that displays your brand’s attributes and expertise.

Integrity. This person should be someone you trust enough to be on their own without bringing embarrassment to your brand. For a personal brand to be effective, the person can’t be babysat every moment. They need to have the flexibility to respond and engage when the opportunity arises, without having to vet everything through the home office.

Remember that your hope is for the qualities of the personal brands representing your business to “rub off” on your brand. People will make this transference quite naturally, so make sure you have the right people in place.

Insource vs. Outsource

The first question you’ll face once you are convinced of the value of developing personal brands for your company is whether to develop them from within or recruit them (or even outsource entirely).

In my experience developing your personal brand representatives from within, from existing employees, is going to have the most impact and be most effective. Your own people know your brand best and (we hope!) will have real passion for it. The advantage here is that training is minimal so content creation and social audience building can commence immediately. The only downside I see is that many companies, especially smaller ones, may not have a person who fits the bill readily at hand.

In such a case it may be necessary to recruit someone who can become your personal brand representative. In fact, that’s how I ended up representing Stone Temple Consulting. CEO Eric Enge had come to know me online. While he was already a very effective personal brand for STC in his own right, Eric had grown the company to a place where he was ready to expand its inbound marketing efforts. He saw that the content I was producing and the audience I had attracted were both highly relevant to and valuable for Stone Temple. So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: come be yourself for us. I’m pretty good at being myself, so I accepted (and haven’t regretted it for a moment!).

The least desirable choice, in my opinion, is completely outsourcing your personal brand representation. In other words, hiring a freelancer to create content and speak and engage on behalf of your brand. This might be better than nothing, but since I believe the best personal brand representatives grow out of a vital relationship with the brand they represent, I doubt it can be as effective. Your best bet here might be simply to get some recognized subject matter experts to publish content on your site, rather than try to palm them off as actually representing you. Inauthenticity gets sniffed out way too quickly these days.

Even if you don’t currently have any in-house, ready-for-prime-time stars in your stable, I would invest in ferreting them out and nurturing them to where they can do the job.

Give them creative space

If a personal brand representative is going to be effective for you, they have to have the freedom to create and experiment. Of course, that doesn’t mean without any guidelines or boundaries, but if you give your representatives too little freedom and initiative, you risk squashing the very thing that would make them most productive for you.

Make sure you have a good, clear mutual agreement with your personal brand rep of how your brand is to be represented. He or she should feel completely at home with your brand’s values, chief goals, and tone.

It’s also important that you give your representative the time they need to do their job. If you’re serious about getting the most benefit for your company from what they do, then their work as your representative should be their primary—perhaps only—responsibility. Creating great content and engaging with your audiences both take a lot of time to do well.

Make the brand connection clear, but subtle

Because you’re obviously hoping for the reputation, trust, and authority your personal brand representative builds to reflect on your brand, you might be tempted to push the connection too hard. By that I mean pressuring the representative to mention your brand frequently or even to be “selly” in her or his content and engagements.

In my experience that’s a mistake. If you push the corporate connection or sales pitch too hard, you kill the goose laying the golden eggs. You destroy the very thing that makes a personal brand so powerful. People have to be able to make a sincere and personal connection with the representative first, not with your brand. Once that connection is made, the connections to your brand will be obvious and much more meaningful. People will see that his or her content is home-based on your site, and of course your brand will be clear on all the profiles of your reps.

If you let people make the connection on their own, the transference of their trust in and liking for your reps over to your brand will occur more naturally, and therefore will be more “sticky.”

Multiply the connection opportunities

This recommendation is closely tied with the one about giving your representatives enough creative space and time to do their work well. In addition, make available to them multi-faceted, multi-channel opportunities to gain exposure. This is one of the secret weapons of real personal brad representatives: they can get into places where your brand logo never would.

For example, set aside budget to get your reps to important conferences. As they gain reputation and stature, they will get opportunities to speak at such events. Never underestimate the value of these in-real-life opportunities. Though they may not seem to have the potential reach of things like social media posting, they can be just as effective, sometimes more so. While Eric Enge and I believe that our content and social media presences help create fertile ground for business opportunities, we know that we have landed many of our best clients through our conference appearances.

You should also encourage your reps to take opportunities to get in front of other people’s audiences online. Whether by guest posting or being interviewed on podcasts, Hangouts, or other media shows, such occasions are yet another way where personal brands can get exposure in places to which you otherwise would have no access.

Your turn

Have you built an effective personal brand? If so, how has it benefited your company? Do you see it as worth the investment?

If you haven’t taken advantage of personal brands to help market your business, why not? What fears or concerns hold you back?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers’ intent—what wemean to search for, even if that’s not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It’s incredibly complex, but in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected in search.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking topic modeling and semantic connectivity. Those words might sound big and confusing, but, in fact, they are important to understanding the operations of search engines, and they have some direct influence on things that we might do as SEOs, hence our need to understand them.

Now, I’m going to make a caveat here. I am not an expert in this topic. I have not taken the required math classes, stats classes, programming classes to truly understand this topic in a way that I would feel extremely comfortable explaining. However, even at the surface level of understanding, I feel like I can give some compelling information that hopefully you all and myself included can go research some more about. We’re certainly investigating a lot of topic modeling opportunities and possibilities here at Moz. We’ve done so in the past, and we’re revisiting that again for some future tools, so the topic is fresh on my mind.

So here’s the basic concept. The idea is that search engines are smarter than just knowing that a word, a phrase that someone searches for, like “Super Mario Brothers,” is only supposed to bring back results that have exactly the words “Super Mario Brothers,” that perfect phrase in the title and in the headline and in the document itself. That’s still an SEO best practice because you’re trying to serve visitors who have that search query. But search engines are actually a lot smarter than this.

One of my favorite examples is how intelligent Google has gotten around movie topics. So try, for example, searching for “That movie where the guy is called The Dude,” and you will see that Google properly returns “The Big Lebowski” in the first ranking position. How do they know that? Well, they’ve essentially connected up “movie,” “The Dude,” and said, “Aha, those things are most closely related to ‘The Big Lebowski. That’s what the intent of the searcher is. That’s the document that we’re going to return, not a document that happens to have ‘That movie about the guy named ‘The Dude’ in the title, exactly those words.'”

Here’s another example. So this is Super Mario Brothers, and Super Mario Brothers might be connected to a lot of other terms and phrases. So a search engine might understand that Super Mario Brothers is a little bit more semantically connected to Mario than it is to Luigi, then to Nintendo and then Bowser, the jumping dragon guy, turtle with spikes on his back — I’m not sure exactly what he is — and Princess Peach.

As you go down here, the search engine might actually have a topic modeling algorithm, something like latent semantic indexing, which was an early model, or a later model like latent Dirichlet allocation, which is a somewhat later model, or even predictive latent Dirichlet allocation, which is an even later model. Model’s not particularly important, especially for our purposes.

What is important is to know that there’s probably some scoring going on. A search engine — Google, Bing — can understand that some of these words are more connected to Super Mario Brothers than others, and it can do the reverse. They can say Super Mario Brothers is somewhat connected to video games and very not connected to cat food. So if we find a page that happens to have the title element of Super Mario Brothers, but most of the on-page content seems to be about cat food, well, maybe we shouldn’t rank that even if it has lots of incoming links with anchor text saying “Super Mario Brothers” or a very high page rank or domain authority or those kinds of things.

So search engines, Google, in particular, has gotten very, very smart about this connectivity stuff and this topic modeling post-Hummingbird. Hummingbird, of course, being the algorithm update from last fall that changed a lot of how they can interpret words and phrases.

So knowing that Google and Bing can calculate this relative connectivity, connectivity between the words and phrases and topics, we want to know how are they doing this. That answer is actually extremely broad. So that could come from co-occurrence in web documents. Sorry for turning my back on the camera. I know I’m supposed to move like this, but I just had to do a little twirl for you.

Distance between the keywords. I mean distance on the actual page itself. Does Google find “Super Mario Brothers” near the word “Mario” on a lot of the documents where the two occur, or are they relatively far away? Maybe Super Mario Brothers does appear with cat food a lot, but they’re quite far away. They might look at citations and links between documents in terms of, boy, there’s a lot pages on the web, when they talk about Super Mario Brothers, they also link to pages about Mario, Luigi, Nintendo, etc.

They can look at the anchor text connections of those links. They could look at co-occurrence of those words biased by a given corpi, a set of corpuses, or from certain domains. So they might say, “Hey, we only want to pay attention to what’s on the fresh web right now or in the blogosphere or on news sites or on trusted domains, these kinds of things as opposed to looking at all of the documents on the web.” They might choose to do this in multiple different sets of corpi.

They can look at queries from searchers, which is a really powerful thing that we unfortunately don’t have access to. So they might see searcher behavior saying that a lot of people who search for Mario, Luigi, Nintendo are also searching for Super Mario Brothers.

They might look at searcher clicks, visits, history, all of that browser data that they’ve got from Chrome and from Android and, of course, from Google itself, and they might say those are corpi that they use to connect up words and phrases.

Probably there’s a whole list of other places that they’re getting this from. So they can build a very robust data set to connect words and phrases. For us, as SEOs, this means a few things.

If you’re targeting a keyword for rankings, say “Super Mario Brothers,” those semantically connected and related terms and phrases can help with a number of things. So if you could know that these were the right words and phrases that search engines connected to Super Mario Brothers, you can do all sorts of stuff. Things like inclusion on the page itself, helping to tell the search engine my page is more relevant for Super Mario Brothers because I include words like Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Nintendo, etc. as opposed to things like cat food, dog food, T-shirts, glasses, what have you.

You can think about it in the links that you earn, the documents that are linking to you and whether they contain those words and phrases and are on those topics, the anchor text that points to you potentially. You can certainly be thinking about this from a naming convention and branding standpoint. So if you’re going to call a product something or call a page something or your unique version of it, you might think about including more of these words or biasing to have those words in the description of the product itself, the formal product description.

For an About page, you might think about the formal bio for a person or a company, including those kinds of words, so that as you’re getting cited around the web or on your book cover jacket or in the presentation that you give at a conference, those words are included. They don’t necessarily have to be links. This is a potentially powerful thing to say a lot of people who mention Super Mario Brothers tend to point to this page Nintendo8.com, which I think actually you can play the original “Super Mario Brothers” live on the web. It’s kind of fun. Sorry to waste your afternoon with that.

Of course, these can also be additional keywords that you might consider targeting. This can be part of your keyword research in addition to your on-page and link building optimization.

What’s unfortunate is right now there are not a lot of tools out there to help you with this process. There is a tool from Virante. Russ Jones, I think did some funding internally to put this together, and it’s quite cool. It’s nTopic.org. Hopefully, this Whiteboard Friday won’t bring that tool to its knees by sending tons of traffic over there. But if it does, maybe give it a few days and come back. It gives you a broad score with a little more data if you register and log in. It’s got a plugin for Chrome and for WordPress. It’s fairly simplistic right now, but it might help you say, “Is this page on the topic of the term or phrase that I’m targeting?”

There are many, many downloadable tools and libraries. In fact, Code.google.com has an LDA topic modeling tool specifically, and that might have been something that Google used back in the day. We don’t know.

If you do a search for topic modeling tools, you can find these. Unfortunately, almost all of them are going to require some web development background at the very least. Many of them rely on a Python library or an API. Almost all of them also require a training corpus in order to model things on. So you can think about, “Well, maybe I can download Wikipedia’s content and use that as a training model or use the top 10 search results from Google as some sort of training model.”

This is tough stuff. This is one of the reasons why at Moz I’m particularly passionate about trying to make this something that we can help with in our on-page optimization and keyword difficulty tools, because I think this can be very powerful stuff.

What is true is that you can spot check this yourself right now. It is very possible to go look at things like related searches, look at the keyword terms and phrases that also appear on the pages that are ranking in the top 10 and extract these things out and use your own mental intelligence to say, “Are these terms and phrases relevant? Should they be included? Are these things that people would be looking for? Are they topically relevant?” Consider including them and using them for all of these things. Hopefully, over time, we’ll get more sophisticated in the SEO world with tools that can help with this.

All right, everyone, hope you’ve enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. Look forward to some great comments, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

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The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and—perhaps most pressingly—what in the world can we do to befriend the bear?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Michael Cottam explains what these things are, and more importantly, what we can do to be sure we get the nod from this particular bear.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Michael Cottam. I’m an independent SEO consultant from Portland, Oregon and have been a Moz associate for many years.

Today we’re going to talk about Panda optimization. We’re going to talk about real world things you can do, no general hand waving. We’re going to talk about specific tactics you can use. We’re going to talk about first of all what does Panda measure, secondly, how might Panda actually go about measuring these factors on your site, and then lastly, what are you going to do to win based on those factors.

What does Panda measure (and what can we do about it)?

To start off, this is the list of the major factors we’re going to talk about for Panda: thin or thick content; the issues around duplicate or original content; the top heavy part of the Panda algorithm; how do you come up with fabulous images and how is Panda going to measure how fabulous they are; and rich interactive experience pieces.

Thin (thick) content

First of all, thin/thick content. Certainly, a lot of sites got penalized when Panda first came out where the site design had basically broken the content out into a lot of pages with just a few sentences on it. Here we’re talking about how much text is there per page? How might Panda actually go about measuring this? This is probably the easiest piece to measure of everything on here. It’s very simple programmatically to strip all the HTML tags out and then just do a word count.

There was a study done — I think it was last summer by serpIQ, and there’ll be a link to that in the notes — that showed that for reasonably competitive terms you needed 1,500 to 2,500 words on a page to rank on page 1. They average this over ten or twenty thousand different keyword searches. Stripping out the HTML tags, count the words, what do you have left? Analyze your own pages and see if you’re up near that 1,500 mark.

How do we win on that? Well, this is all about size matters. At least 1,500 words, push to 2,000 or 2,500 if you can. Sometimes that may mean going through your site and condensing four or five pages of content all into one page. You might think, well, that might make a giant long page, terrible user experience. But you can solve this with tab navigation so all the content is on the page. When you click a tab, JavaScript changes the CSS style of the various tabs to make one part show versus the other part. Google’s going to see everything in all those tabs when they crawl the page, because it’s all in the HTML before you click.

Duplicate/original content

The second thing let’s talk about is duplicate and original content. Now there’s been a ton of stuff written about duplicate content and penalties and how does Google check this, that, and the other.

Lately we’ve seen a bunch of different blog posts from different places talking about press releases and how press releases, well, they’re evil. The links don’t count. Google didn’t spot them all. Google is much better at it than they used to be. But still, if you do a Google search on any e-press release you’ve done, you generally find if you search the first sentence or so of the press release, you’ll find four or five indexed pages containing that. But that’s way better than it was 3 years ago when you’d get 60 pages all be indexed still with nothing else in it.

The press release piece is probably the easiest piece for Google to measure for original content, because if you think about what happens when a press release is republished, you’ve got the site template from whichever news site or industry site is going to run it, header/footer, maybe some sidebar and some ads, you have the press release as one contiguous chunk, and that’s really it. If Google’s going to do page chunking to try to pull out the template, and the header and the footer, and things like that and see what is the core content of the page, that’s probably the simplest case for them to do.

If you’re interweaving bits of text you got from different places with your own text, customer reviews, things like that, that aren’t going to be the same as other sites, then it’s much harder for Google to spot.

What might Google be doing to try to decide does this block of text on your page exist on a hundred other sites? There are various techniques like hashing, or there are ways to record a thumbprint vaguely of what the word patterns are and things like that. That’s not the hard part. There’s lots of talk about the thumbprint and hashing.

The difficult part is if you’ve got a page that’s got content from 12 different places and it’s not just all the manufacturer’s product content or whatever, you’ve got you’ve got your own customer reviews or your own intro sentence at the top, things like that, if you interweave that, that makes it very difficult for Google to go and chunk the page up into meaningful pieces, know when the chunks start and end, and then compare that to what they found on all the other sites that happen to be selling the same product that you’ve got to put the product description on from your site, etc.

What do you do to win there? You really want to interweave the original content that you’ve created. That might be your overview, your customers’ reviews, things like that, your ratings. Interweave that with the stock text and photos. Break it up a bit. What you don’t want is one giant block of text that is exactly the same as that giant block of text that’s on the other hundred sites that are selling the same product you’re trying to sell.

Top-heaviness

Let’s talk about top heavy, a pretty important part of the Panda algorithm. Mostly when people talk about the top heavy algorithm, the example they give is ads above the fold. But if you actually read what Google said about it when they launched it, the description of what they’re trying to solve, it’s not really just about ads above the fold. It’s about anything that’s not content above the fold and your structure of your website pushing that content down, so that when the user lands on your page, they can’t get anything useful without scrolling. That’s what it’s really about.

How might Google be going about measuring whether your site or your page is top heavy? Certainly, if you look at the tools that are built into the Chrome developer tools, Firefox developer tools has similar sorts of things where they can render the whole page there and give you the dimensions and highlight that on top of the page for you. So certainly it’s very easy for them to go and render the whole page.

They’re not going to read through the HTML and assume the first X number of words is above the fold. No sites render that way any more. So they’re going to have to be rendering it to determine above the fold. There’s just too much CSS positioning happening today.

So render and measure the pixels. Then how do you know whether it’s ads or template or content? Now with a lot of the stuff I’m saying here we don’t know absolutely what Google is doing to measure these things, but we can guess and infer based on how we see it behave, what ranks and doesn’t, and also just knowing how parsers are written, how crawlers are written, things like that, what’s possible.

The simplest way, if I were Google Panda, the way I would decide whether something was content or not is I would see if it was clickable. It’s very easy to tell whether a given element there is linked to anything else. This is not going to be a foolproof thing, but your menus are going to be clickable, ads are going to be clickable for sure, navigation buttons are going to be clickable.

There are going to be some false positives with things like photo carousels that may be clickable to advance and things like that. But in general, if you’re trying to do a quick and dirty analysis and say what above the fold is content, if you wipe out everything that’s clickable and wipe out everything that’s white space, you should be left with various blocks around the screen which is probably going to be content. That’s probably what they’re doing. I pretty much bet on that.

How do you win? First of all, minimize your header. If your header has a lot of white space and things are stacked, that’s going to push the content down further on every single page on your site. Look at: Does the width of your main menu bar really have to have that much space above and below it? Has your logo got a lot of white space before the top of the page? Are you putting your share buttons down in a way that pushes everything down? Look for those sorts of things, because a little bit of win there moves a lot of content up the page above the fold on every page of your site.

Another question might be: Okay, so what’s above the fold? Obviously, we don’t know for sure, but we can guess since the vast majority of people are running browsers that are better than 1280 by 1000, that’s probably a good benchmark. If you’re analyzing your own site, look at it with 1280 by 1000, and that’s most likely about the kind of dimensions that Google’s looking at for above the fold.

Image fabulosity

Images are certainly rich content. Everybody loves images rather than text. It makes a much more engaging experience. How is Google going to go and measure how fabulous your images are?

If you’ve got great, fabulous original images, then that’s probably great content to show the user. If you’ve got the same product photos that the other hundred websites all have, then not so much.

What’s Google likely to be doing? First of all, if you’ve never played with Google reverse image search, give it a shot. It’s incredibly powerful. I do a lot of work in the travel industry, and the problem with the travel industry is if you’re brochuring hotels on your site, really your only source for hotel photos, unless you travel to all the destinations and shoot them yourselves, very expensive of course, is you’re going to get the hotel’s image library.

You could take those images. Maybe they show up as 5 mg photos in TIFF format. You can change them to JPEG. You can shrink them down to maybe 1000 pixels wide from the original 5000. You can do a little sharpening. You can convert the formats. You might change the contrast. You might even overlay some text, save it with a different file name. Google will still spot those.

If you do a reverse image search on a hotel photo from pick any site you want, you’ll find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other sites that all have the exact same photo. They’re all named differently. They have different dimensions. Some are JPEG, some are PNG files, etc.

Google reverse image search is really good. To think that Panda isn’t using that to decide whether you have original images I think is crazy. If they’re not doing it, they’ll be doing it next week. Don’t think that just because you renamed a file or cropped it or resized it a little, that you now have an original image. You do not.

Image dimensions are undoubtedly another factor that Google’s going to be looking at. Nobody really wants to decide to go to overwater bungalows in Bora-Bora by looking at little tiny, postage stamp size thumbnails. If you’ve got big thousand pixel wide pictures of these things, that’s fabulous content. You’ve got to expect Panda is going to like that because users are going to like that. Size and originality.

How do you win? Go big. Be original. Okay, you say, “But how do I be original? I’ve got X number of hundred or thousand products on the site. It all comes from manufacturers. I can’t shoot my own photos.”

Consider for your major search targets, like category pages, so not necessarily individual product pages but category pages, make up an image that’s a collage of some of those other images. Take those pieces, glue them together, use whatever Photoshop kind of software you want, but make up a new image that consists of images that are from the manufacturers of the products in that category, and that can be your new image header for that page. Make that category page, which is probably a better search target for you anyway, rank better.

Interactive experience

Certainly, a more engaging page is one where there’s a video to play, or a map you can zoom in on and browse around and see where the hotels are and click on and things like that. Undoubtedly, part of what Panda’s doing is measuring your site to say how much fun is there here to play with for the user.

How’s Google going to measure that? Well, this is an interesting issue, because if you look at how YouTube videos are embedded, by default it’s with an iframe. If you look at how a lot of the mapping tools are embedded by default, it’s with an iframe.

Why is that bad? Let’s think about how Google has considered iframe content in the past in terms of links and on page content and things like that. If you iframe it in, Google has been considering it as belonging to the page it was iframed in, not the page that is embedding that content. So the risk you have here is if you’re using iframes to embed maps or videos, things like that, not sure that Panda’s going to be able to spot that and realize you’ve got embedded rich content.

Chances are with YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, and a few like that Google’s probably done a little bit of work to try to spot iframed in videos. But you know what? There’s a better solution there. With Wistia, you’ve got the SEO embed type that creates an embed object, not an iframe. YouTube, there’s the little checkbox, after you click Share Embed, that says “use old embed code.” So you can do that.

The other thing you can consider is where you don’t have a video already and you want to add rich content, make an introductory video for a category, for your company, for a product. It can be the same stuff that you’ve already written as content for that category or about your company, about us, that sort of stuff. Just talk to the camera and do a 30 second introductory video for that category, that product, or read your review out basically from a whiteboard behind the camera. Then use the transcript of that video as that extra text content on the page.

When we talk about maps, I really prefer to use the Google Maps API. It’s a JavaScript API. You might have some questions. Can Google follow the JavaScript? Well, I think in the case of maps it’s their own product, and certainly Google’s interested in knowing whether a page has a map embedded.

If you screenshot a map and then turn it into a JPEG, well that’s nice. It’s another big image, and it’s probably original now or looks original to Google, but it’s not that extra rich interactive content that a map is.

My advice is use the Google Maps API. I think they’re on Version 3.0. It’s actually a lot easier to use, once you’ve seen an example, than you might think. That seems to work very well for producing that other piece of interactive content.

I’ve talked a lot here. How much does this work? Links are still very important for ranking. Two or three years ago, I would say links were 80%, 90% of what it took to get something to rank. Panda has changed that in an insane way.

Here’s the test example. Go to Google and do a search for best time to visit Tahiti. You’ll find my little site, Visual Itineraries, up there at number one for that, ahead of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, USA Today, all these other sites. These other sites have between 10,000 and 250,000 domains linking to them. My site has under 100. I rank number one for that.

Now, in case you think okay, yeah, it’s internal link anchor text or page title match, things like that, here’s the other proof. Do a Google search for “when should I go to French Polynesia.” The only word in that that matches the page title or any anchor text is the word “to.” It’s a stop word, that’s not going to count. I’m still like number three or number four on page one, up with all these other guys that have tens or hundreds of thousands of domains linking.

Please click through to my site, because I don’t want bounce rate stuff happening, and actually have a look and see what I’ve done. See the thin header I’ve got at the top. Have a look at the images I’ve got in there. Some of them I created by screenshotting Excel charts. I’ve got embedded video. I’ve got an embedded Google Map.

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This is a typical old-school SEO strategy, but what about audience (visitor) intent?

There’s a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages (as there should be). An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely above the fold.

Content, on the other hand, is more than just optimized landing pages. Content serves a purpose. Content can give a company an advantage over it’s competitors. Content is ameans of communicating and building a relationship with an audience.

What is audience intent?

That core audience you’re trying to attract needs something. Maybe they’re researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know where they could go hiking specifically in Utah. Maybe they know they want to go hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking. Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:

What kind of content would help to easily and satisfactorily meet the intent of that visitor?

If the intent is vague (ex: “hairstyles”), what are the various types of intents that they may have? Ex: hairstyle how-to videos, hairstyle lookbooks, short hairstyles, long hairstyles, hairstyles for curly hair, thin hair, frizzy hair, specific hairstyles like up-do’s, braids, etc.

What would they consider useful?

What would they consider interesting or engaging?

What would they consider sharable?

The basic requirements of content strategy

A great piece of content requires all of the things a great landing page does (when the content is indeed a landing page, as opposed to other types of content like white papers, videos, guides, maps, etc.). A great content strategy, though, considers a bit more beforehand, primarily:

What are the goals of this content (why are we creating it)?

What are the goals for the business (how do we make money)?

What does it need to solve for the consumer (what is the audience intent)?

And after thoughtful research around the audience needs and competitive landscape, it addresses this question:

How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there?

Let’s look at these considerations in real-life examples of content strategies. These examples clearly differentiate between simply building landing pages and writing copy vs. coming up with creative ways to meet audience intentions and business goals.

Content strategy example 1:
Content vs. lifestyle

The company in this scenario is currently purely transactional.

The setup (in brief):

Audience: Women age 25-55, typically moms.

The audience need/intent: Discover smart and innovative ways to be awesome and live fabulously while being budget-conscious.

Content goals: Extend the currently purely transactional brand into a lifestyle brand through an extensive, multidimensional content plan.

Business goals: Sell product online.

Previous attempts at content by the company have fallen flat (as have similar attempts by their primary competitors). No one reads their blogs and hasty attempts at launching content pieces have been more or less crickets.

Much of this has to do with a transactional company trying to have a voice when no one is expecting them to talk. A brand without a clear voice and no authoritative experts or influencers, launching random bits of content is not a likely win situation. From an audience standpoint it raises more questions than advocacy – Why is this content here? Will there be more? Why should I consider them the authoritative voice in (topic), especially when there are many more authoritative voices out there dedicating entire websites and lifestyles to these topics?

Lifestyles in this case is the key. Producing content is very different than immersing your brand in a lifestyle:

CONTENT

LIFESTYLE

Landing pages

Self-expression

Articles

Community

Blog Posts

Culture

Videos

Identity

Slideshows

Associations

Guides

Experience

Maps

Emotion

Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They’re all there to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in like moths to flames. Their content isn’t based on keywords and optimized landing pages, it’s based on giving their audiences what they need and getting them excited about it in the process.

The content strategy involves weekly collections, guides, a magazine-style approach to daily content, evergreen marketing pieces and special approaches to holidays, plus acquisitions and partnerships with influential people in the space and potentially a branded “voice of the company” personality doing TV appearances and PR and promoting the content.

Of course this content strategy took several months and a lot of research. In a future post I’ll go into detail on the process and tools available for putting together a comprehensive content strategy.

Content strategy example 2:
Articles vs. awesome content

This client was an online magazine targeted at women, with several top-level categories on the site like fashion, beauty, etc. presented in one of two formats: slideshows or articles.

The setup:

Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.

The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration, tips, ideas.

Content goals: Reach and engage more women.

Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).

The easy part of this content strategy was the architecture. The current architecture was so basic that keyword research alone was enough to provide some great insight into what the audience was looking for that the online magazine was providing but in no clear architectural way. There were quick wins to be had like creating subcategorical landing pages like Spring Trends and Summer Trends under Fashion Trends.

The bigger challenge: The competition. Women’s fashion and beauty is a highly competitive space online. Creating landing pages does not mean they will come. This content needed a more creative “how can we do something better” eye. From the typical SEO mindset you can think of it as “how can we create something that people will link to, share and engage with more than our competitors?”

We utilized several research avenues, primarily:

Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.

Extensive competitive research.

Extensive research into trends on what’s popular in beauty and fashion online and in social networks.

And we found all kinds of cool things that the online magazine could be doing to attract and engage more women. In the end the content strategy proposed features like:

This was presented within the newly proposed architecture with cross-linking opportunities and optimization recommendations (especially around video, images and social sharing) for a complete content strategy.

Content strategy example 3:
Selling vacation packages

An airline sells vacation packages that include flights and tours of the area they mainly fly into. They have the packages on the site but they’re performing pretty poorly.

The setup:

Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.

The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area, find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.

Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.

Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.

Here are the things I looked at in preparation for their content strategy:

What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have? People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).

Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pages in the packages section.

How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content strategy (including additional types of intent like time of year the package is available for instance).

What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a sample size of content currently in season and live on the site, and content out of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was “tagged” with the specific attractions, towns, type of “thing to see,” and activities that were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.

With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:

Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific major intents.

Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the architecture).

URLs: Of course.

Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.

On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module cross-linked from relevant package pages.

Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren’t in season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally available or annually changing content.

Rather than just creating landing pages and optimizing them based on what people are searching for, we took an approach to this content based on the various types of user intents people may have that may bring them to the site and ultimately book a package.

Remember, we’re creating content for people, not search engines

It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it’s likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn’t your good ol’ typical “SEO,” but its also not 1999. The best SEO is—and for many years has been—a good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.

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*drumroll* … That’s right, friends, the MozCon 2014 Agenda is here! You can now show this to your boss to get that final approval and start making plans for how many notebooks you’ll be filling with ideas and tips.

But first, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to buy your ticket today, as MozCon has sold out the last several years.

For the best current deal on MozCon, make sure you’re a Moz Pro subscriber. If you’re not, you can sign up fora 30-day free trial and get the Pro subscriber MozCon price immediately. Cancel your subscription at any time if it’s not for you, and we’ll see you at MozCon 2014 either way!

Okay, let’s talk about just how great this MozCon’s going to be. We have topics ranging from technical mobile SEO and A/B testing to “big content” idea generation and getting maximum value from your PR efforts. There is truly something for every type of online marketer. We have returning MozCon favorites such as Wil Reynolds, Dr. Pete Meyers, and Nathalie Nahai, as well as new speakers like Kerry Bodine, Cindy Krum, and Jeremy Bloom. Plus, we’re trying a new format—a fireside chat—with our CEO Sarah Bird, so we can really dig into what life at Moz has been like since she and Rand switched places.

Not to mention all the photos with Roger, the wonderful swag, yummy food, and all the other MozCon trimmings you expect. And yes, we’re letting Cyrus Shepard emcee again. (I’m pretty sure it’s in his Moz employment contract.)

Wil Reynolds at MozCon 2013

The MozCon Agenda

8:00-9:00am Breakfast

9:00-9:20am Welcome to MozCon 2014! with Rand Fishkin
As our ever-changing industry keeps us on our toes, Rand gives a look at recent changes and where he sees the future of search and online marketing going.

Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and helping marketers worldwide level-up their game.

9:20-10:20am Broken Brand Promises: The Disconnect Between Marketing and Customer Experience with Kerry BodineCompanies chase the business benefits of customer experience, but advertising and marketing communications that aren’t aligned with the true capabilities of the organization foil these efforts.

Kerry Bodine is the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites like Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile apps, wearable devices, and robots.

10:20-10:40am AM Break

10:40-11:20am Improve Your SEO by Mastering These Core Principles with Lindsay WassellDiscover how SEO tactics that win in the long run complement web-friendly business practices and core principles, and how to incorporate this approach into optimization strategies for changes in search results.

Lindsay Wassell is the CEO at Keyphraseology, an Inbound & Search Marketing agency. Prior to Keyphraseology, she led the Moz SEO Consulting Team.

11:20am-12:00pm How to Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities with Richard MillingtonRichard will explain how you can use proven principles from community science to build highly addictive online communities for your organization.

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee, an organization which has figured out how to apply proven science to build powerful communities from any group of people.

12:00-1:30pm Lunch

1:30-2:30pm Architecting Great Experiments with Kyle Rush
A/B testing will no longer be a mystery after Kyle does a deep-dive on every part of the experimentation process.

Kyle Rush is the Head of Optimization at Optimizely. He uses a data-driven engineering approach to execute hundreds of A/B tests.

2:30-3:10pm Mobile SEO Geekout: Key Strategies and Concepts with Cindy Krum
Learn all the technical nuances necessary to make your websites rank and perform well in mobile and tablet search!

Cindy Krum is CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, a mobile SEO consulting and tools provider based in Denver, CO. She is also author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are, which is the first book to explain mobile SEO and gets 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon.

3:10-3:30pm PM Break

3:30-4:00pm Local Lessons from Small Town USA with Mike Ramsey
Whether your audience is in one region or thousands of major metros across the world, these small town lessons will guide you through the complex world of local search.

Mike Ramsey is the president of Nifty Marketing with offices in Burley and Boise, Idaho. He is also a Partner at LocalU and has an awesome wife and 3 kids who put up with all his talk about search.

4:00-4:30pm Top 10 PR Tactics and Strategies of Successful Content and Link Building with Lexi Mills
Everyone’s had an outreach pitch rejected, but Lexi will show you that by slicing and dicing your content, you can turn those no’s into yes’s.

Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients.

4:30-5:10pm Digital Body Language with Mike King
No matter your business goals, Mike will teach you how to harness the power of lead qualification and nurturing through both implicit and explicit user information.

Currently a consultant, Mike King has led teams covering consumer insights, content, social strategy, and SEO for Enterprise brands. With working for brands like HSBC, SanDisk, Ralph Lauren, Johnson & Johnson, and Citibank, his breadth and depth of experience continues to fuel game-changing insights. Mike is a frequent speaker, blogger, and a published author that loves to share his insights on how to do better marketing.

7:00-9:00pm #MozCrawlMore details coming soon!

8:00-9:00am Breakfast

9:00-10:00am How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas with Pete Meyers
Learn how to stay afloat in the coming flood of content, as Dr. Pete provides concrete tactics for sustainably creating high-value content.

Dr. Pete Meyers is a marketing scientist for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past year building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast Project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History, a chronicle of Google updates back to 2003.

10:00-10:30am Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient with Stacey Cavanagh
Stacey will talk you through tactics and tricks to help you scale your content marketing efforts without cutting corners on quality.

Stacey Cavanagh lives in Manchester, UK, and works as head of search for Tecmark. Stacey also blogs regularly on digital marketing, social media, and her favorite TV ads.

10:30-10:50am AM Break

10:50-12:10pm Community Speakers!
While not finalized, community speakers are one of our most popular sessions. Four speakers from our community will give 15 minute presentations on what they’re passionate about. This year, Moz’s Director of Community, Jen Lopez, will be introducing them.

12:10pm-1:40pm Lunch

1:40-2:20pm Keep the Focus on the Doughnuts with Marshall Simmonds
If you’re in a time and resource crunch, Marshall will share which tactics you should implement and prioritize, from the basic to the highly technical, based on measured and quantified data from billions of page views.

Marshall Simmonds has been involved in the search industry since it began. Over the past 17 years, he’s solidified himself as one of the top consultants in publishing and enterprise audience development. Many of the tactics you continue to employ today as best practices were either developed or refined by this guy; he’s “Internet Old.”

2:20pm-2:50pm Dare to Fail: How the Best Lessons Come in the Form of Defeat with Jeremy Bloom
Everyone experiences failure, but Jeremy will share the lessons he’s learned from an athlete to start-up CEO in how to leverage adversity and turn it into a road-map for success.

Jeremy Bloom is a world-champion skier, a two-time Olympian, a World Cup gold medalist, and a member of the United States Skiing Hall of Fame. He played professional football in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 2008, Bloom founded Wish of a Lifetime, which grants lifelong wishes to 80-, 90-, and 100+-year-old people, and in 2010, Bloom co-founded the marketing software company Integrate. Integrate has raised over $20M of venture capital from Comcast, Foundry Group, and Liberty Global. It was named “Best New Company” at the 2011 American Business Awards in New York.

2:50-3:30pm Supercharging Your Digital Analytics! with Justin Cutroni
Despite having lots of analytics tools, we too often settle for the default data and reports so let’s look at a few ways that you can get more insightful, actionable data to make better decisions!

Justin Cutroni is an author, blogger, father, skier, and the Analytics Evangelist at Google. He is a long-time fixture in the digital analytics community and has been nominated as the most influential industry contributor for the past four years.

3:30-3:50pm PM Break

3:50-4:20pm Developing a Formidable Social Platform with Amber Naslund
Learn what makes for a compelling online presence, balance your personal and professional self, and build a system to keep yourself sane.

Amber Naslund is a business strategist and the president of SideraWorks, a social business advisory firm that helps companies adapt their culture and operations to the demands of the social web. She’s the co-author of The Now Revolution, and you can find her on Twitter at @ambercadabra.

4:20-4:50pm Shop ’til You Drop: Google Shopping PPC with Elizabeth Marsten
If you’re wondering what happened to Google Shopping, Elizabeth will explain all, including how to set up PPC the right way and why it matters for your overall marketing.

Elizabeth Marsten is the Vice President of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc. here in Seattle. She is a PPC person at heart, but also oversees the SEO, Social, Content, and Project Management teams.

4:50-5:30pm YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For with Phil Nottingham
Phil will take a deep-dive into YouTube, the world’s second biggest and most forgotten search engine, looking at the best ways to use the channel on both a strategic and tactical marketing level, no matter your budget.

Phil Nottingham is the video strategist at Distilled, where he works with businesses of all shapes and sizes to define their approach to video on both a creative and technical level. He joined Distilled in April 2011, after impressing the company founders with his ability to look like a serviceable pirate, following minimal costume changes, and has since spent loads of their money on cameras and lights.

9:20-10:20am You Are so Much More than an SEO with Wil Reynolds
The label’s irrelevant as you have skills, tools, and knowledge to help get rankings and so much more, and Wil will show you the marketing goldmine you’ve been sitting on.

Wil Reynolds founded SEER Interactive in 2002, which now employs over 70 people and is among the 100 fastest growing companies in Philadelphia. In addition to digital marketing, Wil is also passionate about giving back to the community and sits on the advisory board of Covenant House.

10:20-10:50am Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign with Paddy Moogan
Everyone talks about the need for SEOs to diversify, but Paddy will give you actionable tips to go away and do it, no matter what your current role is.

Paddy Moogan is Head of Growth Markets at Distilled, working in their London office. He is a comic book geek and loves Aston Martins. His heart lives with the Hobbits in New Zealand.

10:50-11:10am AM Break

11:10-11:40am A Mozzy View with Sarah Bird and John Cook
Moz CEO Sarah Bird sits down with GeekWire’s John Cook for a candid discussion about risk-taking, thriving with constant change, and the future of Moz.

Sarah Bird serves as CEO and as a member of Moz’s board. She loves and welcomes conversations on inbound marketing, business models, entrepreneurship, productivity tips, women in tech, and fostering inspiring company culture. Sarah’s sharp business acumen is always paired with her passionate belief in TAGFEE, Moz’s core values.

John Cook is the co-founder of GeekWire, a leading technology news site and community based in Seattle. A long-time tech journalist, John has covered hundreds of startup companies over the years, everything from aQuantive to Zillow.

11:40am-12:20pm Developing Your Own Great Interactive Content – What You’ll Need to Know with Richard BaxterEven if you’re not a technical genius when it comes to interactive front-end web development projects, Richard will show you how to make something the Internet loves from ideation and conceptualization to rapid prototyping, launch, and huge coverage.

Richard Baxter is founder and CEO of SEOgadget, a digital marketing agency specializing in conversion rate optimization, large scale SEO, keyword research, technical strategy, and link building in high competition industries, with offices in London and San Francisco. He is a regular SEO industry commentator and proud Moz Associate.

12:20-1:50pm Lunch

1:50-2:30pm Demystifying Data Visualization for Marketers with Annie Cushing
We’ve all been frustrated with not knowing how to corral data into cool, sexy visualizations, but Annie Cushing will pull back the curtain and provide tips, tricks, and hacks to transform raw marketing data into works of art in plain English.

Annie blogs at annielytics.com, teaching marketers how to scavenge for marketing data and then make it sexy.

2:30-3:10pm Prove Your Value with Dana DiTomasoDana will show you how to report so there’s no doubt in your client’s mind that they’d be lost without you.

Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing BS into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years, she’s seen (almost) everything. It’s true, Dana will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of Dana’s diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

3:10-3:30pm PM Break

3:30-4:10pm The Psychology of Persuasive Content for “Boring” Industries with Nathalie NahaiIf your content needs a jolt of life, Nathalie will show you how to apply targeted persuasion through psychology.

Nathalie Nahai, also known as The Web Psychologist, is a best-selling author, consultant, and international speaker who specializes on the psychology of online persuasion. With a background in psychology, web design, and digital strategy, Nathalie coined the term “web psychology” in 2011, defining it as “the empirical study of how our online environments influence our attitudes and behaviours.”

4:10-5:10pm Mad Science Experiments in SEO & Social Media with Rand FishkinWhether it’s anchor text or sharing on Google+ instead of Facebook, Rand’s spent the last few months formulating hypotheses and running tests, and now he’ll share these fascinating results to help you.

Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and generally trying to be helpful to marketers worldwide.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!